Massive Corporation has just launched two new online video courses to help teachers with coding education! The two courses are both focused on Scratch, MIT’s all-free coding platform built for kids. The first is a free crash course on Udemy, providing a quick (less than 1 hour) introduction to what Scratch can do for educators and students. The other a comprehensive professional development course offering 45 hours of training to master coding education from no experience to being a confident and capable coding educator. Both are great new resources to help teachers discover the joy and power of coding education.
The Intro Course to Teaching with Scratch
The Intro Course to Teaching with Scratch crash course is a great first step to learning about coding education. It’s meant to be a brief overview of the methods, purpose and benefit of K-12 coding education. In this brief 42 minute course learners will discover what the free Scratch coding platform is, how it works, what can be done with it and the benefits to general education that it can provide. It offers a quick and easy summary with lots of inspiring examples to get educators and administrators quickly up to speed what this amazing free option for coding education can do.
The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch Online Course
An intro is all well and good, but substantive change needs substantive supports. Our Teacher’s Guide To Scratch Online Course is a comprehensive learning path support for teachers. It’s designed for reality – as a long term course teachers can steal moments to watch and follow along with, slowly building their familiarity, comfort, understanding and expertise in coding. The 45 hours of content divided into 180 videos each a small bite sized portion of learning on their path to mastery. This scaffolded approach walks teachers through five sections that build up both theoretical and practical knowledge of Scratch, computer science and pedagogy. Learners will work through 20 micro-projects as well as 4 major projects, all classroom suitable through a range of grades. This provides hands-on experience with practical projects while also teaching critical knowledge and theory.
Multiple Learning Paths to Coding Education Mastery
Our goal is to provide the best resources for teachers to learn to code, learn to teach code, and learn to teach with coding. Our two video courses and our book series The Teacher’s Guide to Scratch are all designed to provide easy starting points for teachers. Each of these resources has completely unique content, so you can start with whichever you prefer, and you can use one or all of them, each reinforcing the others with unique insights and providing more projects to explore.
We Need You!
We’re really happy to share these great new resources with the world, but we need your help! A solution to a problem only works if it gets used! We know these video courses, along with our books, are amazing tools for teachers to learn from and to help integrate coding into education, but we need them to be used in order to have an impact. So sign up and watch them yourself, share them with anyone you think could use the resource, post them to resource lists and professional learning networks, and mention them to your school district for district-wide professional development use. Scratch is an amazing tool for education, and it’s even free, so lets make sure we can align schools to work with it and build a better future for our students!